A simple baseband transmission scheme for power line channels

We propose a simple pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM)-based coded modulation scheme that overcomes two major constraints of power line channels, viz., severe insertion-loss and impulsive noise. The scheme combines low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, along with cyclic random-error and burst-error correction codes to achieve high-spectral efficiency, low decoding complexity, and a high degree of immunity to impulse noise. To achieve good performance in the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI) on static or slowly time-varying channels, the proposed coset-coding is employed in conjunction with Tomlinson-Harashima precoding and spectral shaping at the transmitter. In Gaussian noise, the scheme performs within 2 dB of unshaped channel capacity at a bit-error rate (BER) of 10^-11, even with (3,6)-regular LDPC codes of modest length (1000-2000 bits). To mitigate errors due to impulse noise (a combination of synchronous and asynchronous impulses), a multistage interleaver is proposed, each stage tailored to the error-correcting property of each layer of the coset decomposition. In the presence of residual ISI, colored Gaussian noise, as well as severe synchronous and asynchronous impulse noise, the gap to Shannon capacity of the scheme to a Gaussian-noise-only channel is 5.5 dB at a BER of 10^-7.